Imagine

Imagine the Tea Party were black?, progressive activist Tim Wise asks us.

I saw this article cut out in someone's living room this weekend.  Actually, the headline on the op-ed in this particular newspaper (I imagine it popped up all over the country) was "Imagine the same antics from non-white characters".

After a quick read of the article I wanted to respond "let's first imagine some of these antics from white characters, because I sure haven't seen them".

Right off the bat, Tim muses:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns and ammunition.

I would first have to imagine hundreds of white protestors descending upon Washington DC armed with AK-47's and assorted handguns and ammunition, because it didn't happen.  I do remember a report from last year's protests where there was actually a man at one of the protests with an AK-47.  Not in Washington DC.  In Arizona.  Ill-advised?  Yes.  Legal?  Yes.  The cops came and checked him out.  He was perfectly within his rights.

Oh, and did I mention he was black?

Now I think I saw a similar report about a man at a rally in Austin with a non-loaded AK-47.  The police also checked him out and let him continue.  No word on that guy's race.

But noplace, anywhere in the country did "hundreds of white protestors" decend to anyplace "armed with AK-47's" and "assorted handguns and ammunition".  But it doesn't matter to Tim Wise (or MSNBC, for that matter, who edited the video of the man in Arizona so his race was indiscernible, and then talked about angry white people with guns using the video as evidence). 

A few people, and yes it was arguably ill-advised, have shown up at these things with guns to exercise their first amendment rights to speak out about their second amendment rights.   Over 99% of the crowd did no such thing.   There was also a guy arrested -- the headlines read because he had a gun -- at a town hall meeting where Obama was going to speak.  Only he was stopped at the venue because he had a pocket knife.  Not a gun.  They used that as probable cause to search his car in a parking lot where they found a gun.  He did not bring a gun with him to the town hall.

There is a narrative the progressives and the MSM (but I repeat myself) are married to, and that is that the Tea Partiers are unruly, dangerous racists whites who hate Barack Obama because he's black.

Tim's next musing was this:

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry, screaming, black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired.

Talk about spin.  Those protesters, who were indeed mostly white, had been there for quite some time protesting legislation that Congress was about to vote on -- not to spew hatred at minorities.   The didn't suddenly show up and surround black Congressmen.  Congressmen routinely use a private tunnel to get to the Capitol -- but not today.  The protestors were there first, and members of the black caucus intentionally made a show out of walking directly through the protesting crowd with the intent of provoking a pressworthy reaction to use against those protesting.   

Only they didn't get what they wanted.  All they could do was allege that the n-word was shouted (15 times!) and that somebody spit on one black congressman from Missouri (Emanuel Cleaver).   Only the alleged spitting was videotaped, and the video tape showed no such thing.  The capitol police investigated and found nothing.  And the congressman backed off of his claim of spitting after that, calling the alleged "spitter" "the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face".  Now he won't even talk about it.

See, Tea Partiers know what's going on here, and they come armed not with guns but with video cameras.  Lots of them.   And news reporters come armed with video cameras (with sound!) whenever Congressmen come and make a showy March through an opposition crowd to vote on highly controversial legislation.

Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to the first person to come forward with any evidence at all that anybody shouted the n-word at the event.

It's been weeks.  Nobody has stepped forward.

A while later, Pelosi made another show-march through the crowd carrying a giang gavel and holding her nose high in the air in another attempt to provoke an inappropriate reaction.

That march failed as well.

They've failed so miserably that they're encouraging agitators (such as the SEIU thugs who beat up black tea partier Kenneth Gladney at a St. Louis event) ... to "crashtheteaparty".

About the rest of the things in the story, I can only say this.  What would happen if black people did the things some of these white individuals have done?

Nothing.

It is not 1960 anymore.  It is 2010.  And believe it or not, things have changed in this arena.   And this is a good thing.

I've been to two tea parties.  My brother and sister-in-law have been to others.  We've seen none of the behavior described here.  I've been to a couple of meetings of our local Tea Party group.  They're decent people who would love to be minding their own business, and up until last year, most of them were.   But we can't anymore.

We love America, and because of that we don't want to see it "Fundamentally Transformed".   We've been on the road to this transformation for about the last 100 years now.  We have a group in power in Washington that is eager to finish the job.   This really is a dire moment in American History.

Our founders ideals are being purged and replaced with socialist ideals by the usual group of people who think they know what's best for everyone and want to force everyone to oblige their vision.  And yes, we're angry.  We're angry at the people who are driving this, and we are angry at ourselves for letting it get this far.

But we're not violent-angry. The only violence at these events has come from counter-protestors.  We are, as I heard progressives put it in the earlier part of the last decade, engaging in what I believe they called "the highest form of Patriotism".